The Emigration To California: Trying To Leave Chicago

The day our professional movers showed up was the same day Devon, her mother, and her sister took Aliena out to California by jet. They went ahead while my best pal Trevor & I drove the car across the country.

It was a scheduled four-day trip, and we were scheduled to leave the day before the movers came. However, as we watched our next door neighbors’ professional movers taking two days to move all their stuff instead of just one, we worried that our own professional moving service might also take a long time. So Trevor & I changed our plans to wait until the movers were truly done with it all. We hung back a day, planning now to leave Tuesday afternoon, after they had all our junk packed in their big truck.

I had to eat the cost of a hotels.com hotel, because hotels.com will not let you change the date on a reservation. You have to just get another room another night, at that other night’s rates, so you could potentially pay more than double what you intended to if your plans change. BEWARE OF THIS FACT WHEN USING HOTELS.COM.

But Tuesday afternoon arrived with no end in sight for the movers. Devon & her entourage had to leave for the airport, so it was definitely a good thing Trevor & I held back.

As Tuesday afternoon slowly turned into Tuesday evening, it became clear that Trevor & I were not going to leave at all on Tuesday. We would have to leave Wednesday. Which meant another change in hotel stays, which meant another eaten cost from hotels.com. They are cheap, but those nights add up REAL fast. There is no way around this. Trust me, I spent 45 minutes on the phone with those assholes. Wouldn’t budge.

Speaking of companies to avoid, New Planet Moving & Storage also totally blows. Idiot dispatchers sent only two guys to pack up and load an entire two bedroom apartment during the worst heat wave Chicago had seen in ten years. To say that we were all rather sweaty would be an understatement. If you could freeze-frame a shot from Raiders of the Lost Ark at about halfway through the face-melting process the Nazis suffer at the end of the movie, you’d have a pretty good picture of what we looked like.

Imagine going into a coffee shop and the guys behind the counter are dying of heat exhaustion to the point where they can barely function. So you have to go behind the counter and brew your own coffee, and they are making a mess and it’s all disorganized, and when your coffee is finally ready, they charge you for a large when you asked for a small, because all they had available were large cups. And then you had to leave a tip in the tip jar or else you’d feel like an enormous douchebag. Now multiply that by two thousand, and that was pretty much our experience with New Planet. They suck.

The movers were on the road by 11:00 PM. They had been there for twelve and a half hours.

Now, I love Chicago, so if there was one day of toil and shit that could make me happy to leave it behind, it was this. Goodbye, apartment, I thought, it’s been a hot one. Tomorrow I’ll say goodbye to the skyline, but tonight, it’s just goodbye to this cramped little century-old third-floor Lincoln Square apartment. Goodbye.